Renderer General Discussion
This is the thing that makes things look pretty.

You know, the very first tech demo for Sonic 06 that was shown at E3 2005 where Sonic was running around in a green field, fighting Eggman's robots, and finally ends with him facing off against hundreds of robots and going Super Sonic. It was spectacular at the time. It also came with a couple of screenshots including a shot of Sonic in the air above an expansive green field. Probably the easiest kind of tech demo to do, I reckon.

I've talked with Gen about this before, before the whole engine thing, and he reckoned it was certainly doable. Hell, with the video I posted, the guy who made it did his own masters thesis on the subject which is viewable online, so we have at least one way of doing it to go off of. Another example:

This guy did short grass in insane quantities... With OpenGL and a graphics card that, by today's standards, is terrible. There's apparently whitepapers on the algorithms and approach, can't find any yet, but it's certainly an excellent proof of concept. I hear he's working for EA Sports, now. In any case, though, if there is any way to make this engine stand out, it's something like this.

Well, it's only 'simple' in how there's a couple of actual documented techniques out there, but... As I said, I know it's specific, but it will make this game stand out amongst the pack, because, really, no game of actual note (except possibly sports games, but they don't count because they're the same shit every year) makes use of this sort of thing.

Well we've just come about full circle haven't we? Let me just state my stance on this clearly. If the effort to make this work is deemed 'worth it' by the coding types around here, then I'm okay with it. Do note, however, that whatever implementation of "fancy foliage" we use, it has to be optimized to be able to rendered extremely quickly and still look good. Citation needed on this, but Sonic runs at about 60mph or so in Unleashed. All the pretty foliage in the world will look like garbage if it keeps popping in due to Sonic moving too quickly.

Mind you, if Unlimited Detail turned out to be as awesome as advertised, then there would be so much room on the GPU for things like that, that it wouldn't be funny. Of course, we'd have to wait a few months or so to find out, and that's a whole different topic anyway. Would be pretty awesome, though.

Not just the fluid dynamics, the light patterning is pretty convincing despite being a much simplified solution compared to what it actually looks like, and then there's all that shit like proximity shadowing/occlusion which the average person doesn't notice but still adds so much.